


Universals

by Ori_Cat



Category: Chronicles of Ancient Darkness - Michelle Paver
Genre: Gen, Math and Science Metaphors, Reposted following reviewal, Weird Poetry, someday I will write a coad fic where delta-H is positive, today is not that day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-31 01:37:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13964550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat
Summary: More poetry, no plot. In which everyone is doomed, and a little bit strange and inhuman as well.





	Universals

There’s this boy. 

(This is a thing that humans do: they make narratives, real and unreal, sequences of things-that-happened. And once things become things-that-happened, they have _meaning._ ) 

So that is how this narrative begins: there’s this boy, and the universe loves him. He is the lead weight on its rubber sheet, and everything in it - the voice of the wind, the creatures of the land and the air, the awareness of the trees - bends towards him, swings around that pull. The burning wreckage of a star, the death of worlds, and it’s all potential energy right now, of course, but it would only take one tiny nudge to shift that, from stored to released, chemical to light and heat. 

He never does realize that this is not how things are for most people, that they do not see lines of shining power like veins running through all creation. Not that he is never told - but it is like asking a blind man to tell you of colours, the understanding is never really more than intellectual. 

He’ll pray, eventually, blood on his hands and tears on his face and ashes in his mind, grass brushing up against his knees, and the universe will step itself down, wrap itself in the closest thing to a body it can - which will still be overwhelming, its very presence like claws raking over his soul - and it will take his chin and lift his face - enough to see that its eyes are green, before he has to flinch away - and 

He’ll get one plea. 

(Right now, he is nine, and does not know it yet, but this is fixed, immoveable. It _will_ happen.) 

He will be handed a blessing and a curse, to carry at his hips, (and three numb points on his jawbone from the hand of a god), and slowly but surely, step by forced step, with every day that rises cold and sets cold, he will scrape away. At least, all of him that was a boy, was something other than hunger and wildness - a monster that regrets itself, but nonetheless cannot change it. 

The universe may love him, but it was never going to take pity on him. 

* * *

And there’s this boy, another boy, in another place, around whom the lines of power bend like water in a stream. Who dreams of what has passed, and what is to come, and the deepest desires of everyone around him; who sees things that no-one else can see and hums, consistently, to songs no-one else can hear. Whether this makes these things more or less real, no-one can say. 

(This is a thing that humans do: they believe in magic.) 

The water refuses to drown him, and the snow refuses to freeze him, and so what is he to fear? Who is he to mistrust? Why should he _not_ view the world as something to explore, something bright and beautiful? 

(But there are many things in the world to fear, to _rightly_ fear, and he will learn them all, eventually.) Though not soon enough. Not soon enough to learn how to run, or how, barring that, to fight them. 

(This is a thing that humans do: they delineate between culture and nature.) And the boy is born in culture, but nature - when he is born, nature says _mine._ And _sure, yours_ shrugs culture, and though the exchange may take decades to make fully, to push and pull, break and mend and break again (culture is anabolic whereas nature is catabolic) 

Now, though - now, when he’s still a boy, an immature and still and safe - there are eels to catch with twine and paths to explore and he is happy, in his ignorance. 

After all, future horrors cannot be run from. 

* * *

And there’s this boy - a third boy - and the universe loves him. (The universe is nepotistic, it seems.) Not quite as much as the first boy, the black hole, but certainly enough. It comes to his hand like the spider comes when it feels the fly strum on the threads of its web. 

(This is a thing that humans do: they feel envy.) 

The boy is sharp as shattered bone or the eye of the sun, and all that can be said about him - all that is of import - is that he wants. Everything. To climb to the peaks of the highest mountains and characterize the darkest depths of the forest, to delve below the earth until he breaks through to the underside, and he wants to explore that void. To know the power that makes the seasons turn and the leaves fall and raises islands from the sea. He wants to watch the thoughts flicker in a deer’s brain and the beating of a beetle’s heart. He would pull down the moon and sun and the stars from the sky, keep them sharp and crystalline in a lidded basket, just to possess that light. 

The universe loves him like the land loves the sea, _you shall come this far but no farther,_ and he returns the favour, _I will consume you then, piece by piece, lay you in strata within me. There shall be nothing left but me, when I am through._

The boy doesn’t know this yet, of course. He is only eleven, and has not yet thought to command existence entire. 

He does not yet know it is impossible. 

* * *

We could stop at three, right? Three is a good number. Good for stories. We ought to stop at three, let the tale run out from there. Three children who are just a bit _more_ , and their fate. How much could they do, how much could they be - 

* * *

There’s this boy, and that is all he is - human, through and through, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, from fingertip to fingertip, into the marrow of his bones and the pulp of his teeth. 

(This is a thing that humans do: when highly emotional, they weep tears.) 

And the universe looks at him and then turns away, uncaring. The world does not answer him; stones are dark and silent; the tongues of birds and beasts dry on his lips. When he dreams, it is odd senseless things cobbled together by his own brain out of his memories and fears and the other tiny sparks flickering inside his skull. None of them ever come true. 

Instead, he learns to craft tools and make shelters and to hunt and to gather and he is content, he is that elusive always-pursued _normal,_ and he does his best to be kind and patient and good. Does pretty well, in the grand scheme of things. 

It is said that every person receives only the amount of love that they give, but this cannot be true, because this boy is always running a deficit. His father, his mother, brother, friends - they never love him back. Not unconditionally. Not as he loves them. 

(If they did, surely they would stay.) 

… that was not entirely true, to say that the universe never cared, never noticed him. It did, once, for exactly as long as it takes to declare _I shall have no rivals._

(This is a thing that humans do: they bury their dead, in complex rituals that are of no use to the objects thereof. And they lay flowers, or other pretty things, and say everything they never thought to say, before. And when the dirt has been shovelled over they return to their homes, and they weep their emotional tears, and they call it grief.) 

Maybe that’s what saves him, in the end. That he has never been great, that he has never been powerful, that fate overlooks him, this small and insignificant thing - not worth the breaking. 

Someone has to be left behind, after all. Someone has to craft the narrative.

**Author's Note:**

> Information sourced from here: https://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm


End file.
